Amazon to Hire for More Than 40,000 Corporate and Tech Jobs Across US

In this Nov. 13, 2018, file photo, employees walk through a lobby at Amazon's headquarters in Seattle.

In this Nov. 13, 2018, file photo, employees walk through a lobby at Amazon's headquarters in Seattle. AP Photo/Elaine Thompson

Many positions will be in Seattle and northern Virginia, but the company is looking to recruit in other regions as well.

Amazon is hiring for more than 40,000 corporate and technology jobs in dozens of locations across the U.S., the company said Wednesday.

Many of the jobs will be located at its headquarters in Seattle and at its HQ2 site in Arlington, Virginia, near Washington, D.C. But the company is also planning for significant recruitment in Dallas and Austin, Texas; New York; Chicago; the Atlanta area; Boston; Nashville, Tennessee; Los Angeles and San Diego; and Detroit, among other places, a company spokesperson said by email.

All told, the tech giant, expects the jobs to be spread across roughly 220 locations nationwide.

The company will also be hiring for "tens of thousands of hourly positions" in its operations network, the announcement said, with plans to hold what it is describing as its biggest-ever training and recruiting event on Sept. 15.

Amazon had about 950,000 employees in the U.S. as of late June, according to an earnings report released in July. The Wednesday announcement said it had hired over 450,000 people in the U.S. since the beginning of the pandemic.

The company is hiring for a variety of jobs across all of its businesses, including its cloud computing division Amazon Web Services, advertising and an initiative to build low orbit satellites to provide high-speed internet. Amazon is also looking for store designers after reports last month that the company is planning to build retail locations similar to department stores. 

Among the open positions, there are about 15,000 jobs for software developers, as well as thousands of nontech jobs, such as area managers for the company's logistics network, and about 300 jobs for research scientists.

Local governments competed fiercely in the 2017-18 timeframe to become the home of Amazon's HQ2 second headquarters site, which held the promise of bringing thousands of high-paying jobs with it. The company initially settled on Arlington and New York City, but later abandoned plans for the New York project amid local opposition.

Virginia state lawmakers in 2019 approved a package of subsidies potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars, along with local incentives, as part of efforts to lure the company to Arlington.

Amazon said Wednesday there are about 3,000 employees assigned to the HQ2 site and that it is looking to hire about 2,500 additional corporate employees for technical and nontechnical jobs at the Virginia location. The company says that it plans to grow its HQ2 workforce to around 25,000 over the next decade.

Bill Lucia is a senior editor for Route Fifty and is based in Olympia, Washington.

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